Personal schedule for Gail E. Harris

"Fat Models, Skinny Controllers" they scream. Pushing your logic down
to the model layer is a key step to improve testability,
maintainability, and code quality. But many developers now have "junk
drawer" models that don't realize these goals. Having a fat model
isn't enough! Come learn techniques to refactor your models and make them beautiful.
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One exciting feature slated for Rails 3.1 is the "flush": pushing pieces of the view out early, before the view has finished rendering. Learn how to use this effectively to minimize your perceived response times, how it influences the way you factor your application, and how it can complement other existing caching techniques, such as client-side personalization and edge side includes.
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Are your methods timid? Do they constantly second-guess themselves, checking for nil values, errors, and unexpected input? Learn how to write code in a straightforward, confident style that is more testable, easier to read, and easier to debug.
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Well-designed APIs can double as a great way to help make scaling easier by splitting your application in two. This talk will discuss some new libraries and techniques which aim to let you make the transition fun and manageable by splitting your application horizontally, not vertically - into services.
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Let's face it. CSS is dumb. There is no such thing as a DRY CSS file and stylesheets are often the biggest blemish in an otherwise beautifully coded app. Sass is the future of stylesheets. Rails 3.1 includes it by default and the W3C is adding concepts from Sass to CSS itself.
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Social games backends share many aspects of normal web applications, but exasperate scaling problems. Follow this talk to see how we evolved and brought a plain rails app to 5000 reqs/sec, moved part of our data from SQL to NoSQL in order to reach 100,000 queries / second and see what we learned from this experience.
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A case study in introducing Rails into a public NASA Earth Science system. Despite a broad investment in Java, we conducted a survey of modern development technologies including Flex, Django, JSF2 and Rails. We chose to move forward using Ruby on Rails with JRuby. This presentation discusses our experiences, including technical, process, and psychological, using RoR on a production system.
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Given the many features of Rails that promote good security, one gets
the impression that your typical Rails web site is relatively secure.
That impression is completely misleading. Without paying deliberate
attention to security details, it is almost certain that your
application has security flaws. This talk will cover the ins and outs
of web security and help you build a secure site.
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We all know that Rails is great for building traditional web applications that serve dynamic HTML pages. But more and more, people are reaching to other tools, like Node.js, when they build web applications with a lot of logic in the client. People often use the argument that when you remove the view helpers, there isn't much of value left in Rails.
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Light-sabers help, but they don't win the war. Bring your computer and Ruby and we can defeat the Emperor. Tactics and tools will be shown so you can be ready for the battle!
We need less robots and more thinking allies! Join us now!
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A funny thing happened at DreamForce this year. The company that made it safe for CIOs to buy cloud services bought a wonderful little company called Heroku. DreamForce is not a show a lot of RailsConf old-timers care much about, but it's a place where CIOs (and the kinds of companies that have such things) go to learn about how to do things better, faster, and cheaper.
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